Chapter 1. 1963–2008: History, Microhistory, Metahistory, Ethnography

Flesh and Light You Breathed into the Golden Rocks

We often rest comfortable in the notion that we, ánthropoi, humans , are interminably engaged in an attempt to understand the world around us, to make meaning out of garbled symbols. I would argue, with Yiorgos Cheimonas, for the opposite: that the farther away we are from power and its mechanics, the more we try to make ourselves understood by the world that surrounds us; that each of us is crying out to be heard and agonizes over the process of translating this cry, a process that often takes on a violent form, the more violent, the more desperate; and, further, that if this effort is at the center of the project of humanity, then the project of anthropology is to make this process of translation intelligible. It is to provide a map of the circuits that are traversed in the walk toward this translation.

Imagine that you find yourself in an old, walled city, with narrow, winding streets, dead ends, windows that open and close unexpectedly. A city inhabited by humans who have experienced terror and mistrust, hatred and joy, deep passions and frightening desires. At its vortex resides an ánthropos, a human being whose locations are always contested and interconnected: she is someone's parent, someone's child, someone's sibling, someone's friend and, perhaps, even someone's comrade; she is claimed by her family, by her state, by her party as an object of their want and desire, perchance she is a (their) subject too.

This central ánthropos (whose centrality lies only in the fact that, unbeknownst to her, she has been claimed as the subject of this project, too), who has desires, passions, needs of her own, acquires (or is given) dimensions that are beyond her physical capacities, is endowed with intentions, thoughts, ideas, and capabilities that could never materialize in one single human, becomes a specter that contains everyone she is made to stand for. She becomes dangerous.

Not only does she become dangerous, but she inaugurates a category that is made to fit her and she is made to inhabit: the category of the dangerous person. A person who posits a danger not because of the acts that she commits and the gestures that she makes, but because she (and those like her) thinks such acts and imagines such gestures. Her body, as flesh and bone, enfleshes the danger that she has come to embody and represent. Her presence becomes dangerous for the polis, as she is always suspected of thinking up thoughts of exploding (the categories, the borders, the classifications, the complicities, the secret treasuries of) this city. She becomes a suspicious enemy; she cannot be located in any specific class or neighborhood; she transcends the polis; she becomes a part of it; she knows its inner workings, makes hiding places in its buildings, learns and produces a topography that is also a topology completely unimagined and unsuspected by the sovereign who suspects her. She becomes one with the polis, a Homo politicus, hence dangerous, to whom we can, perhaps, give a name, let's say a “Lucy” or a “Rosa” or an “Oedipus.”

You were you weren't you were leaving you were vanishing. I said hit me

On the face on the teeth and on the eyes hit me.

Break my body the strength

Because the voices are calling me.

On the rock I sat.

The voices were coming their heads were coming

White and I was chasing them away with my staff.

They buzzed they brought messages—

The hands nailed from the light

Salt light silence.

I heard all the voices

That favored the whisper.

Dream shaken by the wind—and I was going

To the water of the rock to wash

The hands and the face

For the blood to go away.

The blood does not leave the island. With flesh yes

Fighting death fighting

With you my dead the dead

The wood the sails—

Voice of the dead voice of the wood and of the sea

On the sandy island

Your own voice

Wasn't heard anywhere

Not the voice of denial

But human voice

Of fear or of annihilation

As I came out from the dream

And I was going where was I going?

These were hands

My hands your hands the hands of the dead

And the island in the sun

And the island on the seabed

And the sandy seashore

In the sun sharp rocks

Golden rocks

Whatever I heard only I know.

Because the dead hear only the language

of the dead.

I fully acknowledge how problematic this collective “we” is, for, as Derrida notes, “who could ever venture a 'we' without trembling?” (2001). But it is a “we” that attends to the writing of mourning (and still mourning, of things not that much different from in my Fragments; Panourgiá 1995). I am writing of the gestures of mourning, gestures that can be deciphered only through the exploration of deflected accounts, practices, narratives, and self-presentations that I am trying to trace in this present project. This is mourning that most often does not appear as such, does not cry out its melancholia, for a khōra (that happens to be my khōra, also, my place) where justice forgot to happen, where the pain of existence got flattened into discourses of entitlements and acquiescence, where the seduction of capitalist comforts (even when never attained and realized, even when eternally suspended as desire) has completely dislocated what one of my interlocutors noted (lamenting its loss), namely, the ethos of poverty as a cultural value. “Poverty [ftōhia] and friendship [philía] are what kept us together,” said this person, who has gone from being a barefoot village boy to a multi-millionaire restaurant owner. Therefore it is precisely in the name of friendship, as Derrida says, in that there is no “we” without or outside of friendship, that the utterance of “we” presupposes a friendship that allows, asks, and demands to share the burden and the responsibility of mourning, that this “we” that I invoke here wants to be heard.

Wendy Brown complicates and problematizes the use of “we” in different ways when she invokes the collectivity of the “we” in her discussion of mourning the revolution. Without a trace of hesitation (and rightly so), Brown speaks of the inclusiveness of the “Left” (my quotation marks) in socialism, in the antiwar movement, in a feminist revolution that “carried the promise of remaking gender and sexuality that itself entailed a radical reconfiguration of kinship, sexuality, desire, psyche and the relation of private to public” (Brown 2003: 8). Brown deploys this “we” in the face of mourning for the feminist revolution that has failed, for the emancipatory promise of that project, and it is a “we” that needs to be uttered and articulated in the face of so many carefully constructed fragmentations of identities that refuse to undertake the responsibility of a “we.”

In Jean-Luc Nancy's terms, we should not take this “we” as being “'composed' of subjects,” neither is it “a subject” as part of a process of a narrative of a self, and hence it does not necessarily posit or transcend the “aporia of all 'intersubjectivity'” (Nancy 2000: 75). But Nancy suspends the idea of the “one” and “with” in the colloid that produces the “we,” in that no “we” exists unless it exists as the one being “with-one-another.” In other words, the “we” presupposes and understands that all who comprise it are specific “ones” existing with other “ones” (2000: 76).

Elephantis (2008 [1997]) brings the entire question of “we” into sharp focus in the case of Greece (but, one would suspect, within a far wider context, and certainly with Derrida in mind) when he posits this “we” as a question in reference to the legacy of the October Revolution. Which “we,” Elephantis asks? “The radicals and socialists of the end of 1910, the Communists of the decade of the twenties, the socialists, the antifascists of the interwar period, of the antifascist war, the EPON, EAM, ELAS of the Resistance [the Leftist youth, civilian, and military organizations of the Resistance], the captains [military leaders of ELAS], the fighters of the emphýlios, the exiled and imprisoned, the Leftists of EDA [the coalition of the Left between the 1950s and the 1970s], the fighters against the junta, the ones who revered the Soviet Union, the Trotskyists, the Archive Marxists, the peasantists, the libertarians, those who considered the de-Stalinization of 1956 to be the 'true' vision of communism, the Zachariadists [loyal to the Secretary General of the Communist Party of Greece, Nikos Zachariadis], those who followed the 'Rebirth,' the Maoists, the Guevarists, the Lambrakides [followers of the assassinated Grigoris Lambrakis, members of the World Council for Peace], the Eurocommunists, members of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) and its youth (KNE) after [the split of the Party in] 1968, those agreeing with 'the movement,' the ecologists, the feminists, the members of Synaspismos [the new coalition of parties of the Left], the partisans who fled to the countries of Eastern Europe, the exiled, the imprisoned, the 'movement,' the rest of the Left, the dēlôseies [those who signed declarations of repentance], those who denounced others, those who were 'rehabilitated,' the dead?” (42). But there is nothing stable in the categories that Elephantis gives, and he knows it. As he says, there are real, actual people who inhabit these categories; they are not just ghosts or specters of existence. He knows full well, as he says, that “there is no continuous 'we,' unchanged by time.” He recognizes that the history of the terms that he has produced is a history that belies uniformity and homogeneity but that nevertheless is the history of the current Leftists, sometimes grouped together, often fragmented, through the enchantment of friendship and the bitterness of betrayal, mourning for a better world that could not have come.

In any case, however, an act of mourning can be claimed behind every “we” that is uttered. The “we” is intimately connected to the work of mourning, and it is precisely this mourning that I am invoking here.

I recognize perfectly well the dangers that lurk in this universalism, as I recognize the utterance itself as a universalizing gesture. I do hope, though, in the course of these pages to show how this universalism slides between its own totalizing discourse and the particularity of specific and individual experiences. Ánthropos (in the plural, ánthropoi) is the term deployed in the narrative discourses of the experience of history that I am researching—as an existential category, not simply a biological one. In Greek the process of socialization, of making a child part of a social community, a social animal, is conflated with the process of “making one human [kánō to paidi ánthrōpo],” bringing one up from the realm of animality (as a biological being) into the realm of humanity, thus bringing one from the realm of no responsibility to the world of recognition of utter responsibility. Ánthropos is the biological animal that has been brought up to recognize the responsibility of its actions. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in 2001 commented on this concept of “making a child human” as a common locution in India, also. We will see how this existential attribution was denied to the Leftists in Greece when their fundamental humanity was explicitly denied to them, especially when, under torture, they would be told that through torture (and its educational effect) the torturer would make them human (tha se kano ánthropo).

Foucault argued in 1966 that the deployment of the term ánthropos as a concept that places a particular animal (the human animal) within the temporal specificity of its course of development happens at the moment when labor, language, and biological life become a constellation of existence, produce a new form of life, and are “unified around and constitute a would-be sovereign subject” (as Rabinow notes in 2003: 13). But Foucault (and Rabinow, through his reading) are concerned with the history of ánthropos as “the logos of modernity” (Rabinow 2003: 15). What concerns me here are the ways in which the concept of ánthropos is used on the local level, by social actors, and how in its plasticity, indeterminacy, and hesitancy it becomes politicized. In other words, I am concerned with how the concept ánthropos is constantly contested and redefined precisely because its porousness lends itself to such fluidity.

Yiorgos Cheimonas (1936–2000) was a prose writer and psychiatrist. His writings comprise prose, inquiries into the nature of logos, translations of ancient Greek drama and Shakespeare, articles, television interviews, and writings on psychiatry. On January 12, 1985, in what became Ta Taxidia mou (My Journeys), Cheimonas writes that, if the philosophical and scientific explorations of the human (ánthropos) aim at an understanding of the world by the human, the frightening demand of art is for the human to be understood by the world.